Currently, many software applications are distributed over the World Wide Web (also simply referred to as “the web” or “the Internet”) such that these software applications are accessible via network accessing software, such as a web browser. One example of these software applications is a dynamic web application, such as a shopping cart. There are multiple frameworks that allow such a software application to render data over the web. Conventionally, these frameworks include a data transformation mechanism to transform data from one format into another format usable by the software application.
Data transformation problems and solutions have been around for a long time as there always seems to be data that is in one format that needs to be transformed to another format. As a result of this common problem, there have been many frameworks developed to address the various data transformation obstacles that engineers need to solve. One conventional way to transform data is to use Extended Markup Language (XML) and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT). The data is essentially presented as a tree of data that can be manipulated into another tree format. The rules that decide how data gets transformed are stored in a set of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) files. These rules are also referred to as XSL rules. A parser traverses a XML tree, applies the XSL rules, and then transforms the data. While this can be a very powerful approach to data transformation, it can also be more complex than needed for smaller projects or data trees that need a minimal of transformation applied.